Wednesday, July 14, 2010

Using RSS Directories, Feed Aggregators, and Pinging

RSS FeedsIt's essential to use as many high quality ways to drive traffic to your site as you can. Some of the best ways to do that as a blog owner are to use RSS directories, feed aggregators, and pinging. Understand and utilize each of these in turn, and you should see your traffic start to increase!

RSS directories are sites where bloggers and readers can submit feeds from their favorite blogs from around the web. These syndicate your content, and make it easy to find for those who seek information in your niche. In many cases, your submission can count as a backlink -- this means good things for your standing in the search engines! Some of the most popular out there are Feedage.com, Feedagg.com, MillionRSS.com, and others. You can see a more complete list at: http://www.toprankblog.com/rss-blog-directories.

A feed aggregator is also known as a feed reader. This is a place where people can collect their favorite RSS feeds from around the web. Favorites include Google Reader, My Yahoo, FeedBucket, and many others. You can see a more complete list at: http://www.newsonfeeds.com/faq/aggregators.

There are some SEO experts who believe that adding your feed to a feed reader at Google, Yahoo, or MSN can get your content spidered and indexed more quickly. Test this out for yourself to see what you think! In any case, you'll want to include an RSS icon or link on your blog to make it easy for your visitors to subscribe with their own feed aggregator.

You should also "ping" your blog when you submit new content. If you are using self-hosted Wordpress, this is done automatically for you. You can even add more sites to ping (in your settings), or use an outside service such as http://Pingomatic.com or http://Pingoat.net. Both of these are excellent ways to alert the services that your content has been added to or changed. Be careful! You don't want to "over ping" or you could be banned from these ping engines.

Part of the appeal of blogs is that they have RSS feeds and so many great SEO benefits. Being able to promote your RSS feed (and not just your blog address) is a huge benefit! When you do it in the right way, you should start to see some great traffic as a result.

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